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London

By the time the Dickens family arrived in London in 1822, it was the largest city in the world and the heart of the British Empire. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, industrialization had been transformed the social and economic character of the city. From shipbuilding to domestic service, London thrived as a centre of production and employment. Workers from as far afield as India and China flocked to the city in search of new opportunities, causing a dramatic and continual increase in the city’s population.

Not all of London’s inhabitants, however, shared in its wealth and prosperity. High levels of poverty, caused by unemployment and low wages, created scores of slum neighbourhoods that came to represent the darker side of this great city. For the young Dickens, these poor areas – and their inhabitants – replaced Chatham as the focus of his attention. He looked upon slums like the Seven Dials, situated close to his Camden home, with equal amounts of fascination and repulsion and would find inspiration from their squalor and vice throughout his literary career.

On 26 December 1823, the family left Bayham Street and moved to 4 Gower Street North, a small house in the suburb of Bloomsbury. With his father’s debts increasing, his mother, Elizabeth, attempted to alleviate the financial burden by setting up a school for young ladies (pictured below). Known as ‘Mrs Dickens’ Establishment’, the venture was a complete failure, despite Dickens’ attempts to drum up business in the local area. As he would later recall, ‘nobody ever came to the school, nor do I recollect that anybody ever proposed to come, or that the least preparation was made to receive anybody.’

Elizabeth Dickens

The next attempt to ease the family’s financial burden came in the form of a job offer from James Lamert, the family’s former lodger. Employed as the manager of a local boot-blacking factory, he suggested that Dickens get a job at the factory and do his bit to support the family. While Dickens staunchly protested, his parents gratefully accepted the offer.

On 9 February 1824, only two days after his twelfth birthday, Dickens left his home in Gower Street North and walked the three miles to Warren’s Blacking Factory at 30 Hungerford Stairs, the Strand. His job was to label the individual pots of blacking, a mixture used for polishing boots. In return, he received six shillings per week, approximately £12.58 in modern currency. In this ‘dirty and decayed’ environment, as he would later describe it, Dickens quickly became known as ‘the young gentlemen’ among his fellow workers. While some may have treated him as an outcast, a young boy called Bob Fagin took Dickens under his wing. He would later become the namesake for one his most famous villains, Fagin, in Oliver Twist.

Debtors’ Prison

Within two weeks, any hope of escaping the rats and the monotony of the Blacking Factory was quickly crushed when his father was arrested for debt. On 20 February 1824, John Dickens was detained in a local sponging house, a place of temporary confinement for debtors. His crime was the non-payment of a debt worth £40 and 10 shillings to John Kerr, a local baker. As his father was detained on a Friday, Dickens spent the weekend running messages across the city, desperately trying to raise the £40 that would secure his release and prevent any further legal action.

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The Courtyard of Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison

But Dickens’ efforts were in vain. On Monday 23 February 1824, he accompanied his father to the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. Situated on the south bank of the River Thames, Dickens later described the prison in his novel, Little Dorrit. It was ‘an oblong pile of barrack building, partitioned into squalid houses standing back to back, so that there were no back rooms; environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at the top.’ Humiliated and broken, John Dickens urged his son to never make the same mistakes that he had: ‘if a man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but a shilling spent more would make him wretched.’

With his father imprisoned and unable to support the family, Dickens’ meagre salary from the Blacking Factory was needed more than ever. By the end of March, the family had left the house at 4 Gower Street and had moved into John’s cramped room in the Marshalsea. Dickens did not accompany the family and was instead sent to lodge with Mrs Ellen Roylance in Little College Street, Camden Town. His six shillings covered the cost of food and board and he visited his family on Sundays.

The enforced separation from his family, made worse by the considerable distance between Camden and Marshalsea, quickly became too much to bear. After emotionally breaking down on one of his Sunday visits, alternative accommodation was found in nearby Lant Street, allowing Dickens to take breakfast and supper with his family every day.

On 28 May 1824, John Dickens declared himself an insolvent debtor and agreed to settle all his debts at a later date. In return, Marshalsea granted his freedom. One week later, John inherited £450 from his late mother and used this money to clear some of his debts, now totalling around £700. The reunited family moved to 29 Johnson Street, Somers Town. John set out on a new career path, becoming a journalist for the British Press in 1825, having retired from the Navy on an annual pension of £146.

A decision was now taken to remove Dickens from Warren’s Blacking Factory and enrol him at the Wellington House Academy on Hampstead Road. Elizabeth resented this decision, arguing that her son should continue working to support the family. In a later reflection on this episode, Dickens wrote ‘I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am: but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.’

Artist’s Impression of Charles Dickens at the Blacking Factory

The emotional impact of his time at Warren’s Blacking Factory and his father’s imprisonment at Marshalsea should not be underestimated. While the family never spoke of it again, the sense of being ‘utterly neglected, hopeless’ and ashamed, as he would later recollect, haunted Dickens for the rest of his life. Moreover, only two people – his wife, Catherine, and friend, John Forster – would ever learn about these events during his lifetime. Looking to his novels, the repeated themes of unhappy or orphaned children, deserting parents, money troubles and imprisonment, suggest that Dickens never fully came to terms with these experiences and, more importantly, the parents, especially his mother, that caused them.

The Young Dickens at Work

In March 1827, after studying for almost two years at the Wellington House Academy, his father’s employer, the British Press, went bust. Evicted for non-payment, the family moved house again, and Dickens and Fanny were taken out of school. Once again it was decided that Dickens should get a job and help to support the family. He was employed as a solicitor’s clerk, firstly for Ellis and Blackmore of Gray’s Inn and then for Dickens Molloy of Symond’s Inn. Reminiscent of Warren’s, his employment at Gray’s Inn was secured by his mother through a junior partner, Edward Blackmore, who boarded at her aunt’s house at 16 Berners Street. He found the environment unappealing and developed a general dislike towards solicitors, later weaving them into many of his novels, particularly Bleak House. To counteract the tedium of the office, Dickens analysed and imitated the clerks and street vendors he met while running errands. According to his colleague, George Lear, Dickens developed a strong, local knowledge of the city and seemed to know about everything from ‘Bow to Brentford’. In the evenings, Dickens frequented, and sometimes performed in, the local theatres and music halls, generally with his friend and fellow clerk at Ellis and Blackmore’s, Thomas Potter.

As he didn’t intend on remaining a solicitor’s clerk for long, Dickens investigated other career options. Journalism was of particular interest and he began teaching himself shorthand. In November 1828, at the age of sixteen, he left Ellis and Blackmore’s and set up as a freelance reporter for the Doctors’ Commons. Later described in David Copperfield as a ‘cosey, dosey, old-fashioned, time-forgotten, sleepy-headed little family party’, Dickens was exposed to a range of civil law cases, from the granting of marriage licences to the registering of wills. But the work, when he could find it, was badly paid and no more exciting than that of a solicitor’s clerk.